Review
The slow death of a father becomes the anchoring disturbance of this book along with adolescent sexual memories and the isolations of the artist as an adult. In this odyssey, the poet contemplates his thwarted journey to desire and the Jung-like landscape of his acculturation and development.
A walk through a graveyard in Athens, a Greek beach memory shared as a boy, an erotic moment in Tinos, a fantasy man in Athens' Zappio Park, all complete one location for this work which shifts again and again with the fluid ease of imaginative self-discovery. Kostos translates for us both the blue yearnings of early illusions and desires and the horrors of human mortality -- the visits by a math tutor who Kostos is boyishly infatuated with; a friend dying of AIDS having his limb amputated -- converting all into small triumphs of language, meter and rhythm parsed out in tiny heartbeats, heartbeats of a caring, intelligent writer.
Kostos wanders through dream sequences and eloquent classic ruminations. With metonymy of the senses in play, Kostos colors and creates striking images that range from sources such as "The Charioteer" of Hellenistic sculpture to the imagined experience of Helen Keller eating a pomegranate. A quotation from Keller, used in Kostos' poem, is revealing: "Life is either a daring adventure or it's nothing at all."
Kostos' poetic ideas are indeed adventures in diction, language, and sensation. This is poetry that does not end with a period, as the title points out, but curves with the ardent shape of breath, form, thought and feeling. It speaks in eventualities. Kostos' "commas" are the breaths in a mind which pause between metaphor and reality, symbol and essence, that quality of poetry which never stops but hovers. Kostos tells us in his title poem how he cannot contain his life in words or a book, that from state to state he restlessly moves on. This is a life daring to reveal itself or to face "nothing at all." -- The Lambda Book Report, June, 1999: Walter Holland, author of Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 and a novel, The March
What is the sentence that ends with a comma, aside from grammatically incorrect? Is it a statement without a conclusion? A fragment for consideration? Or simply a pause that refreshes? In the case of the first full-length poetry collection by Dean Kostos, the answer is "all this and more."
The Sentence that Ends with a Comma offers 49 moments that give cause to pause. The book sweeps through a wide range of places and subject matter: from Brighton Beach to Tinos, Greece; from Parkinson's disease to AIDS.
As interesting as the poems are the commas, or means of linkage between statements/poems. One method of linkage is the array of people that inspired some of these poems. It's quite a diverse collection of "inspirers," including Helen Keller, Jesus Christ, the Charioteer at Delphi, poet Paul Eluard, and the painter Vermeer -- and that's only in the first 24 pages.
"Part I: Parting the Blue of Illusion" contains 20 poems, including the one sharing the section title. Written "for Paul Eluard, in response to his poem 'Liberte'," it opens as follows:
Writing The Earth Is as Blue
as an Orange your pen navigated its rind
Crossing boundaries of the brain's terrain
you roved into darkness
When the Tower of the Moment exploded
its tiles scraped words from your tongue
Six poems inspired by trips to Greece round out part I. Watch how Kostos, in just the first three lines of "At the Pharmakeio" (the last poem in Part I) creates enough intrigue to lead the reader to want to read further:
What are they waiting for in this room of blue bottles?
With eyes like O's in the word MOON,
three women swivel toward me.
We move from a "room with blue bottles" to the first line in "Part II: Color Speaks":
Waves of cobalt-blue flags shooed us into the mall.
Such subtle links abound. I wonder how many other reviewers will catch the fact that the last line in the first poem and the last line in the final poem both end with a comma.
"The Window-Dresser" gets even better:
In my bedroom I twisted toilet paper
into heads, pinched torsos into waits, splayed
hips into sheaths, shirred like corn husks.
Joining the circularity is a sense of progression. In Part II, sequencing is deliberate:
"Terrain: 2 AM" is followed Talis(manic)" (whose three stanzas are titled 8:30 AM, 9:00 AM, and 6:30 PM), followed a bit later by "Dance of Hours." The last line in this section even concludes "Follow . . . me . . ." to lead us to "Part III: Eventual Locations."
The section title gives one cause to pause: eventual locations for Kostos, or all of us? Whether we relate to "In My Medicine Cabinet," "Rally," watching 8 women make an AIDS panel ("The Unveiling"), taking a "Brighton Beach Escape" (dealing with his father's death from Parkinson's disease), or the four poems about death followed by "Rimbaud Remembered," Kostos weaves some wonderful imagery to the eventual location: "The Sentence that Ends with a Comma," said comma linking us to the opener.
Often surreal, never dull, and beautifully designed, there is only one glaring error in this book: The Sentence that Ends with a Comma should end with an exclamation point. For when it comes to contemporary American poetry, it doesn't get much better than this. -- David Messineo, Sensations Magazine, Summer, 1999
From the Publisher
Dean Kostos' poems are chiseled with masterly craft. Dazzling surreal imagery and deep feelings fuse in these poems, many of which are as beautiful as priceless objects from the golden age of Greek civilization. Kostos is a poet of many gifts. I am sure we'll be hearing again from him in the future. He's the real thing. Jaime Manrique
Fluid is a good way to describe Dean Kostos' style--"calligraphy of swim on thirsty paper"-- moving with ease between the classical and the contem- porary, the seductive and the straightforward. Whether eavesdropping on mannequins in a bridal shop or wandering through a "museum of scent," the reader will be glad to follow his "lines' lush variety" all the way to the last comma. Elaine Equi
Music carries Dean Kostos to the hall of mirrors where sounds arrive before the train lands on the moon. Some tell him to think about "reality," but he knows it's all actual. The words in here are arrows and the poems are apples we eat in delight. John Yau
I'm rarely excited by most unknown poets, but am amazed at Dean Kostos' originality, his extraordinary voice, and his wealth of surreal yet lucidly accurate images. And not least his sure-footed storytelling. He seems to have an inexhaustible imagination used with technique and rightness of tone and observation. This brilliant, perceptive book is informed by poetic intelligence and dazzling metaphors. A cross-cultural Euro-American melange of 20th century innovative styles merges into Kostos' distinct voice. Harold Norse
